Chapter 7: A Shadow in the Glass

Chapter 7: A Shadow in the Glass

The words on the screen burned brighter than the fire that had scarred her leg. Give them the lantern.

The realization from the old forum post didn’t just chill Jennifer; it hollowed her out, replacing her organs with a sphere of cold, heavy dread. Jimmy hadn't warned her. He had infected her. He had walked up to the edge of his own personal abyss, and with a desperate, apologetic shove, had pushed her in instead. The knowledge of the creature was the contagion, and she was patient zero of a new outbreak.

Her desire, a frantic, silent prayer, was for it all to be a delusion. For the forum post to be the ramblings of a crank, for her broken mind to be weaving a grand conspiracy to explain a simple, tragic fire. She wanted the psychiatrist-prescribed cocktail of pills on her nightstand to work, to be the chemical blanket that could smother the embers of her memory and grant her the mercy of a dreamless sleep.

She swallowed two pills, more than the prescribed dose, chasing them with a swig of lukewarm water. She lay down in her small, sterile apartment bedroom, the city lights of downtown painting shifting patterns on her ceiling. This was supposed to be her sanctuary. The noise, the concrete, the sheer volume of people—it was all meant to be an armor against the memory of a silent, watchful forest.

But the medication, once a dulling fog, was now just a bitter taste on her tongue. It didn't touch the core of her fear. The obstacle was no longer just her trauma; it was an active, watching presence she could now feel, a weight on the back of her consciousness. The lantern was lit, and something in the darkness had seen the flame.

Sleep, when it finally came, was no escape. The nightmares intensified, their plot twisting into this new, horrifying truth. She dreamt she was running through an endless forest, holding a kerosene lantern, while Jimmy’s voice echoed around her. "I'm sorry, Jen! It's the only way! Just give it to someone else!" And in the trees, she could see the silent, masked figures, their heads turning in unison to follow the path of her light.

She woke up gasping, the sheets twisted around her legs, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. The pills were useless.

The haunting began subtly, a series of glitches in the fabric of her new reality. A flicker in her peripheral vision as she waited for the bus, a shape too tall and too thin to be a person, gone when she turned her head. A momentary distortion in the hiss of static between radio stations, a sound that almost resolved itself into a low, guttural bleat before being swallowed by a pop song. She blamed it on exhaustion, on the medication, on the lasting trauma. Her rational mind clung to these explanations like a drowning woman to a piece of driftwood.

One afternoon, walking home from a half-hearted attempt to find a new job, her own shadow stretched long and thin before her. For a single, heart-stopping second, the shadow’s head changed. Two cruel, curved horns bloomed from the top of the silhouette, stark and black against the pale concrete. She cried out, stumbling back against a brick wall. A passing businessman gave her a wide berth, his face a mask of mild alarm. When she looked again, her shadow was just a shadow, perfectly normal, its shape mundane and hornless.

She was starting to fray, the line between memory and reality blurring into a terrifying gray haze. The city was no longer a shield. It was a hall of mirrors, each pane of glass, each polished surface, a potential window for the horror to peer through.

The turning point, the moment her desperate denial finally shattered, came on a Tuesday night. The rain was lashing against her third-floor apartment window, the city lights smeared into a watercolor of neon and gloom. She wasn't watching TV; the noise was just a distraction, a barrier against the silence. She sat on her threadbare couch, nursing a cup of tea, her reflection a pale, ghostly image on the dark screen.

And then, she saw it.

It wasn't a flicker. It wasn't a trick of the light.

In the reflection on the television screen, something rose up behind her. A tall, amorphous column of shadow, darker than the unlit room around it, unfolded itself in the space behind the couch. It was a precise, terrifying echo of the moment at the Ellisons’ house, the silhouette against the red silk. And as it reached its full, impossible height, the two long, curved horns defined themselves against the faint reflected light.

It had no face. It had no features. It was a hole in the world shaped like a man, crowned with the sigil of a goat.

Jennifer’s breath hitched in her throat. The teacup slipped from her numb fingers, shattering on the floor and spattering hot liquid across her ankles. She didn't feel it. Her eyes were locked on the screen, on the reflection of the impossible thing standing just feet behind her. It was here. It wasn't in the woods. It wasn't in her head. It was in her apartment.

The reflection of the Horned One seemed to tilt its head, a slow, deliberate gesture of observation. It knew she could see it. It wanted her to see it. It was showing her that the walls, the locks, the distance from Clark’s Creek—none of it mattered. The curse was not a haunting of a place, but a branding of a soul. Her soul.

With a raw, choked scream, she launched herself off the couch and spun around.

There was nothing there.

The space behind the couch was empty. The air was still. The only sounds were the drumming of the rain and her own ragged, panicked gasps for air.

She backed away until her shoulders hit the cold wall, her eyes darting around the small living room, searching every shadow, every corner. She was trapped. She had run from the woods, but all she had done was change the shape of her cage from a glass mansion to a brick box. The monster hadn't been left behind. It had been carried inside of her, a passenger in her own terror.

The surprise, the final nail in the coffin of her sanity, was a small, insignificant sound that cut through the storm.

Scraaaape.

It was a soft, dragging sound. The sound of something hard, like a talon or a hoof, drawing a slow line across a surface.

It came from the window. The one the rain was beating against.

The third-floor window.

She stared, frozen in place, as a long, thin scratch appeared in the condensation on the outside of the glass, a pale line appearing from nowhere, slowly etching its way down the pane. There was no fire escape. There was no balcony. There was nothing out there but a sheer brick wall and a fifty-foot drop to the wet alley below.

The haunting had begun anew. And this time, there was absolutely nowhere left to run.